Consultant, CMO, Non-Exec
The BBC are apparently removing thousands of recipes from their website. This has been announced, slightly clumsily, in a leak in early May, and then more officially by the BBC themselves. This blog post takes a look at what happened, and ends by looking at the possible motivations that may have caused the BBC to communicate …
Twitter and Google regularly do something that – if you or I did it – would be breaking the law. They reveal the identities of people who courts have decided should not be named. If newspapers and members of the general public name them, there are very serious repercussions. Yet Google & Twitter’s algorithms seem free to …
Continue reading “Twitter and Google are naming people they should not”
Just over 3 years ago I wrote a post about 2 algorithms that appeared to be doing something that – if you or I did it – would break the law: Google’s image search algorithm and Twitter’s keyword search algorithm. At that time, they were displaying pictures of one of the killers of Jamie Bulger – …
Continue reading “The Footballer Adam Johnson, Search Algorithms, and the Law”
The first “brand new newspaper for 30 years” just launched: ‘The New Day’. The pitch is nice: A small team of 25 staff. Gender neutral, politically neutral, & focused on positivity. It sounds like a very light, non-business version of the FT. It was free for the first day, will be 25p for the first 2 weeks, …
Here are the results of a survey of 1,044 people in the UK asking whether the UK government should carry out air strikes against ISIS in Syria. The exact question wording was as follows: “Should the UK Government carry out air strikes against ISIS in Syria?” All answers were gathered between 13:52 & 19:40 on Wednesday 2nd, December 2015, …
Continue reading “Syria Air Strikes: What do the UK public think?”
Here’s a very short tale about spending what looks like millions on launching a digital product, without paying attention to the basics of digital marketing. It is about “Electric Jukebox”, a service that has just been launched, with Stephen Fry, Robbie Williams, Sheryl Crow, and various other celebrities on board. Electric Jukebox is billed as a simple …
Continue reading ““Electric Jukebox” & Forgetting to Register Domain Names”
Here’s a tweet that sums up the depressing state of the London property market. You may well have seen this: Only… if you spend 2 minutes looking into it, it may not be all it seems. As you can see, it was retweeted well over 4,000 times (probably many more if you take into account …
Continue reading “Is There Really a “£500 Bed Under The Stairs” in London?”
In the UK, the main opposition party just appointed a new leader. A man called Jeremy Corbyn. Many of the country’s leading newspapers have since cast him variously as a buffoon, a court jester, a threat to security, a terrorist sympathiser, and various other extremely negative figures. Even newspapers that traditionally support his party seem …
Continue reading “Who would win an election today: Jeremy Corbyn or David Cameron?”
Hillary Clinton has officially announced she’s running for US presidency in 2016. This was all handled rather well online, with a high-production value video, a quick change of all of her social accounts, and the launch of a new campaign site. Alongside the positives, there were however a few mistakes. None of these were ‘campaign …
Continue reading “7 Notes on Hillary Clinton’s “#Hillary2016” Digital Campaign Launch”
Toward the end of 2014, a man called Mark Wright won “The Apprentice” in the UK, with his idea to create a Search Marketing Agency called ‘Climb Online’. Just after the show aired, I ran a quick poll asking the question “Do you think Lord Sugar should have invested in ‘Climb Online’?”. After 45 minutes I …